Travelling Light (18 page)

As I crossed the lobby the doorman nodded politely and held open the door. A brisk wind had opened up the sky. Sharp shafts of sunlight reminded me of tracer and the smell of tracer, and as I turned the corner onto First Avenue I saw a black man flagging a taxi. He wore a long grey overcoat, and while I waited to cross on the light he glared at me. The eyes above cruel cheekbones were streaked red and he had a wide, leopard's mouth. The face was a version of that face I'd known so well. A cab pulled over and he leapt inside.

The dead live on in your imagination for a while. I had already seen Joe five or six times in California, coming towards me on an empty street, sometimes carrying a knife. I had twice seen his face pressed against the passenger window of a passing car on the 880 freeway. I was teaching myself not to get upset each time this happened. The dead stay with you, like a reflex. Doctors say it's normal.

I walked the thirty blocks to Yorkville, dawdling in the sunshine. Somewhere in the sixties I went into a bar and ordered Irish coffee. I spent half an hour in a furniture store and very nearly bought a buttoned leather ottoman. I was brooding, trying to analyze the situation dispassionately, but I soon gave up. After all, passion was its essence. Love and war are much the same. When you start to believe you're seeing things perfectly clearly you've fallen for the most dangerous illusion of all.

I ended up arriving half an hour late at Le Vieux Kitzbühel
.
As soon as I entered I saw Jane sitting on a corner banquette beside an old man with salt-and-pepper hair. At the next table three husky young men in nearly identical navy-blue suits were watching me.

Jane and the old man were so engrossed they didn't notice me at first. I thought they were holding hands beneath the table, and it wasn't until I was standing directly in front of them that I saw Kruger was in fact clutching a small, shiny pistol that was half concealed by the drape of the tablecloth.

Jane glanced up and saw me. Kruger looked up slowly, then dropped the little gun onto his bread plate, where it made a clink. Jane immediately picked it up and shoved it into her briefcase.

“Professor's become very security conscious,” she said quickly. “He thinks I need to have something for protection.”

The old man rose to shake hands. “Where I live now, in Washington, I see trouble everywhere,” he said in a trembling voice. “I'm just an unhappy old man.”

He had been appointed to the Senate the year before, after his predecessor committed suicide by throwing himself under a train at the Falls Church Metro station. Kruger was pre-eminent in our field, one of the great war theoreticians. Apart from his academic career he had been Kennedy's man in Argentina and one of the professors who strongly supported the Gulf of Tonkin resolution. Reagan considered appointing him ambassador to the
USSR
but inexplicably passed him over. No one knew for certain what madness or secrets had driven his predecessor to kill himself, although the usual rumours were aired by the media.

“I wish you'd never gone west,” Kruger said, turning to Jane. “Life in California coarsens and insulates.”

Jane smiled, then threw a glance at me. Her eyes are green and she doesn't blink as often as other people do. Hers are like deer's eyes: calm, quick, calculating. She has always been extraordinarily responsive to danger.

When Jane first told me about her aged lover, I had imagined a distinguished figure, a man of the world, tall, silver, erect. I had seen photographs of Hermillo Kruger in newspapers and magazines, usually flanked by men even more renowned—presidential advisers, Wall Street princes — and he always looked forceful, masculine, saturnine. But in the flesh he reminded me of a flotilla of mothballed destroyers on the Hudson that I was taken to see when I was a little boy. Kruger pulsed with the same greyness, the same atmosphere of decay. His cheeks sagged, his pale eyes were bloodshot, and his collar was loose at his scrawny neck. His manicured fingernails were thick and yellow, dead looking, as though his manicurist were a funeral director.

I thought of Warrant Officer Joe Crozier, so precise and delicate, so ferocious and so quick, flying terrible, joyful, violent missions out of Radcliff and Toughie, Belcher and Becky, and all the other forward base camps and fire bases whose stew of crazy monikers I can't seem to forget. W-1 Crozier, a cool, efficient, superbly trained twenty-year-old, in repose at the controls of his gunship.

One thing you can say about war, it is an affair of youth.

The waiter arrived with three bowls of red goulash. Kruger immediately started in on his. A moment later Jane, beside me, gave a little start. Glancing down, I saw Kruger's hand on her knee. She pushed it away, but a few moments later, when I checked again, it was there, and this time she let it stay.

The three young men at the nearby table had an air of having spent too much time in each other's company. Every now and then I caught one of them staring at me or at Jane, as if they were trying to transcribe us directly into their computer files.

Kruger had insisted on ordering the entire meal — Jane told me this was an old habit of his. The waiter arrived with plates of dried beef, noodles, Wiener schnitzel. As we ate he recited what must have been one of his old Columbia lectures. Jane had told me that Kruger was very sensitive to the fact that his theoretical contributions to the field had never been as widely cited as his infamous area studies. Afterwards plum cakes were ordered for us, and
kaffee verkehrt.
We were sipping plum brandy when Kruger began begging Jane to go with him to the apartment he still kept near Columbia. He said he wanted to give her some books and hear her opinion of an op-ed piece his staff had been working up. He was very disappointed when she said she had an unbreakable appointment downtown. I noticed a dribble of saliva on his chin, which Jane, reaching over, deftly wiped with her napkin. In seemed to me that Kruger had aged at least six years between the goulash and the last, bitter drop of fruit brandy.

Jane was supporting his elbow as we left the table. The navy suits rose from theirs and followed. At the checkroom Jane and I were introduced hurriedly and capriciously, as though to servants or graduate students. The young men took over, two of them helping Kruger retrieve his overcoat and hat while the third went to summon a taxi.

Out on the sidewalk, Kruger hugged Jane. It was apparent that he didn't want to let her go. A young man was holding open the door of a cab.

“Te quiero,”
Kruger croaked as the young men bundled him gently into the cab. Two flanked him in the back seat, the third sat with the driver. Jane and I stood watching as the cab pulled out into the stream of traffic. Then she furtively slipped the little pistol from her purse and dropped it into a trash container.

A few minutes later we were in a cab racketing south on Second Avenue. Jane's elegant face was pressed against the greasy window while blocks of restaurants and bars slid by. “He said if I wouldn't sleep with him he'd shoot himself,” she remarked. “But I don't believe he was serious. He's always operated that way.”

The traffic thickened in the seventies and our driver lost the rhythm of the lights, stopping for the first red in thirteen blocks. There was something sexual in this battle of traffic, cars and trucks and buses lurching forward, drivers competing to gain a few seconds on the lights. I began kissing Jane's neck. Our cab broke free from the pack and raced south before sinking into another cloud of traffic below 66th Street. There is powerful desire connected with cab rides in Manhattan, with plane trips, with people thrusting through sidewalk crowds. On our flight home in 1970 a couple of sergeants smuggled a girl onto the plane and offered her at ten dollars a throw all the way to Oakland. I understand why businessmen on coast-to-coast flights are on the lookout for girls.

In the fifties I began scanning the sidewalks, searching for dark faces. It's not hard to get preoccupied with the doings of the dead. But what had I done that was so terrible? Gotten drunk the night of his memorial service, taken Wanda to my hotel, tasted her, smelled her scent on me for months afterward?

There had always been in-country stories, stories the troops never brought home. At Fire Support Base Toughie there had been a mortar platoon with a famous sergeant, Sergeant Kyle, a Kentucky woodsman who was killed one afternoon when a round blew up in his mortar tube. This was early in the war, before our time. They had him in a bag waiting for evac when the perimeter was breached and a portion of the fire base was overrun, including the hooch where they stacked the bodies. Afterwards everything got blown up or torched and they never recovered their sergeant.

Three years later, when Joe and I were regularly flying in and out of
FSB
Toughie, Sergeant Kyle was still a fact of life in that mortar platoon, though most of the troops at the base had still been in high school when he'd gotten zapped. But the way they told it, Sergeant Kyle was still out beyond their last perimeter, sniffing the ground, keeping an eye on things. Patrols sometimes found VC corpses with their throats cut, out there just beyond the wire.

We used to pray to Sergeant Kyle before flying a mission out of Toughie. We all did. There was a shrine in one corner of the mess tent. No one was ashamed.

Jane's afternoon appointments were a fiction. We let the cab take us back to Gramercy Park, and as soon as we were back in our room she insisted we make love. When I kissed her, I could taste fruit brandy on her lips. Page proofs of her article that was to be published in
Foreign Affairs
were spread out beneath us on the bed, and I could see my book on the night table, lying open at a page she had wanted to memorize.

Jane liked to sleep in a pile of blankets; she felt protected that way, an animal in a burrow. Sometimes the thick, acrid silence of hotel rooms makes me wonder if I am dead. Is it the drapes blocking noise and light, the noxious chemical traces left by frequent and vigorous cleaning, the lifeless aroma of nylon carpet? When it was dark, I crept from our room, carrying my shoes, and ate dinner alone in a noisy place downtown that seemed to specialize in tiny drinks and food portions too large for anyone to consume. As I was sipping my thimbleful of Scotch, a filthy bearded individual entered the place and hurried among the tables, snatching food from plates. Diners were too frightened, perhaps too startled, to react, and the manager, a blond youth in flannel shirt and corduroys, did nothing while the derelict stalked up and down grabbing steaks, sandwiches, and handfuls of salad, stuffing everything into his pockets. After he stalked out the door I watched him pacing on the sidewalk in tight, obsessive circles, cramming our food into his mouth.

When Joe died, it had been a relief, not just for me but also for everyone who'd known him. For Joe himself, probably. That's why his memorial service had felt like a celebration.

I took a cab uptown. The doorman of Wanda's building admitted me without question. When I knocked lightly at her door, it cracked open a few inches and Wanda peered at me. Neither of us spoke, and after a few moments she unhitched the chain, opened the door wider, and pulled me inside.

The apartment was so dark I couldn't see, but it smelled of fear, the way my slick would smell when it was crammed with pure-blooded nineteen-year-olds I was ferrying to some hot LZ.

“I told you not to come till eleven,” she said.

Gradually my eyes were adjusting and I could make out pricks of light from candles she had lit and placed throughout the apartment. As soon as I saw the candles I asked if Joe had been visiting.

“He tried to come up here this afternoon,” she admitted. “Doorman says, ‘Wanda, there's a gentleman to see you.'

“‘See me? You mean like the rabbi, the lawyer?'

“Doorman says, ‘Noooo, ain't no rabbi. It's a black man. Want me to send him up or not?'

“Then I feel it: I know it's Joseph. I say, ‘No, no, you send him on his way, tell him don't come round bothering me.'”

“Why?” I asked. “I thought you loved him. Anyway, are you certain it was Joe? Couldn't it have been the
UPS
man or something?”

She wrapped one arm around my neck and kissed me, piercing my mouth with her tongue, pressing her body into mine, curling and twisting like a snake.

“He walks,” she said. “And tonight, just now, I can feel he's real angry.”

She took my hand and led me into the kitchen. In the candlelight I saw what looked like jewels and blocks of money piled on the countertop.

“Old man keep stuff in the icebox.” She picked up a diamond ring and handed it to me. “Feel how cold that is.”

“I thought I saw Joe this morning,” I told her.

She did not seem surprised. “You're like brothers, what Joe used to say. I could tell when I saw you that night — you are Joe beneath the skin. Same as him, no different. That's maybe why he is after you. He wants to come back inside. And he wants me, same as you do.”

She gave a little shudder, though I wasn't convinced she really was afraid. Then she began shoving jewels and shrink-wrapped packages of currency into what looked like a pillowcase. “You ride with me. We take the Lincoln.”

Thirty minutes later we were on the other side of the tunnel. Wanda was at the wheel, smiling, teeth glowing in the green light from the instrument panel. I told her about Jane and the senator and my fear that the old man was planning to murder me. I don't know if Wanda was listening. She licked her lips and switched on the radio, setting it so the tuner leapt from station to station in ten-second bursts.

I saw her glance at the rear-view mirror and for a moment I felt Joe Crozier rising, quiet as a cat, from his hiding place in the back seat. My brother in arms. Wanda drew breath sharply and let go the wheel for an instant, and the big car swerved towards the concrete divider. But she recovered fast, and in another moment we were back in the smooth, almost liquid flow of the passing lane, doing an effortless seventy. I looked around. The back seat was empty.